Other People's Kitchens. Q&A with Julia Watson
Julia lives in a small Victorian worker’s house where floor space is really limited.
Q - Hello Julia. Can you please tell us a little about yourself, where you live and your substack publication?
A - I was a Foreign Correspondent for a British national newspaper in Moscow, then Washington DC, then Brussels. Now I live in London, which has become probably the best food capital in the world. In Moscow, good food was hard to come by. So I launched ‘Capital Gains’, a weekly newsletter on what produce I was finding on street corners driving between interviews and press conferences and how to cook unfamiliar ingredients. The US Embassy distributed it to the foreign community. They called me one day to say the Kremlin wives had asked to be put on the mailing list. If they didn’t know where to get stuff then finding food was an even bigger challenge than I thought!
Landing in DC straight from Russia, I realised how much easier it is as an ex-pat anywhere to settle in if you can locate familiar foods from back home, particularly if you have family. So I created eatWashington.com, a web site that along with chef interviews, their recipes and food news, told readers where to get global ingredients locally and what to cook with them.
Tabled is a continuation of that. It’s published weekly with a recipe and includes the history of the recipe’s main ingredient, or an anecdote around discovering a dish it contains. Ant egg soup in Laos? Eat it before the ants climb out of the bowl. Tabled also aims - I hope without beating the reader over the head - to shine a light on what goes on in what I’ve dubbed Big Food Biz and how our health, animal health, and the health of the globe is affected, often adversely, by its profit-focused strategies.
Q - Can you please describe the layout of your kitchen, how much of a role does it play with your family, and when writing for your publication 'Tabled’?
A - In DC, I had a huge kitchen where everyone hung out. Now I live in a small Victorian worker’s house where floor space is really limited. So I converted the 4 feet by 12 feet basement that originally stored coal into a galley kitchen, and bashed a big hole in the walls of the dining room above so friends can lean down and talk as I cook. I actually find my galley kitchen much easier to work in. I never move more than a couple of feet and I love the fact that though the space is too small for anyone but me, they’re cheering me on from above.
Q - What are your most used kitchen gadgets and kitchen gear, that you cannot live without?
A - I’m not a huge gadgets fan. They need fiddly disassembling to wash them and take up space I just don’t have. When I travel, I never see gadgets in village kitchens or hawker stalls. In South East Asia I learned how a heavy meat cleaver can easily mince up meat and finely chop hard-skinned vegetables like gourds. When, much younger, I ran away to Greece, I only took a chef’s knife and a mouli legume - a metal hand-operated food mill. I used its largest disc to grate cheese, its medium disc to turn it into a sieve, its smallest to grate garlic.
My favourite spatula is a clean finger. One of my most used knives is a small serrated one with a plastic handle I bought for under a dollar in Greece. After 20 years, it is still so sharp I have to be really careful using it.
Q - How and why did you become interested in the food industry and why did you want to write about it?
A - When I arrived in the US, I filed for a UK national newspaper and wrote on food for the Washington Post, Gourmet Magazine and a local newspaper group. Then UPI (United Press International) made me their Food Writer and I became interested in the politics of food. Our curiosity about food is voracious, and the internet provides unlimited access to recipes. But we’ve only recently become aware of the influence of the industrial food complex and the nutritional and environmental problems associated with much of what we eat. I had been shocked to discover that High Fructose Corn Syrup whose use in Europe is negligible, is present in pretty much all American packaged and processed foods. It’s sweeter and cheaper than other sweeteners and corn farmers are heavily subsidised. Also, the labelling of ingredients in the US is far less stringent than European regulations. Consumers have a powerful voice. Change what we choose to buy and we could change what manufacturers try to sell us.
Q - You have won several awards for your writing, can you please tell us about them?
A - I’ve written three cookbooks, each of them containing the recipes that I write to appear in the Bruno, Chief of Police crime series by Martin Walker. It’s set in the Dordogne, South West France, home to duck, truffles, walnuts and goat’s cheeses. What I became tired of in the cookbooks I was sent as a food writer was the perfection of how the dishes all looked. I’m not a professional chef, just a home cook. So when it came to photographing my recipes I insisted there should be no food stylists. I sent each dish to the photographer straight from my stove. Edges charred in the oven? Edges were charred in the picture. Readers say they’ve found this a relief.
The Bruno Cookbook and Bruno’s Garden Cookbook, published by Diogenes, both won Gourmand International’s World’s Best French Cookbook. It’s the only competition for food and drink content from publishers across the globe. Bruno’s Cookbook was published last year by Penguin Random House in the US and Quercus in the UK. I’ve also written a cookbook, not quite ready for publication, on the food of Sri Lanka.
Q - How would you describe the regional cuisine where you live ? Are there fresh food markets, or farmers markets available?
A - I live in an area of London with a traditional Cockney street market selling fresh fruit and vegetables every day but Sunday. It’s bordered by Middle Eastern stores, a great butcher, and two well-stocked fishmongers. There’s also a huge supermarket by our best chain. I have two small farmers’ markets within walking distance and Borough Market, London’s largest farmers’ market, is an easy Tube ride away. If you don’t go at the weekend it’s a paradise for food enthusiasts.
Q - Is there anything about your kitchen that you would like to change or improve on?
A - I wouldn’t mind a large American refrigerator. I only have space for a tiny under-the-counter fridge. But I really enjoy shopping a couple of times a week at my local street market whose ‘barrow-boys’ make you feel you’re their favourite customer. In my DC kitchen, the generous storage space I had made me stuff it to the brim, so the ingredients that got pushed to the back of the cupboards seldom saw the light of day. Now with very little storage, everything is in reach and in regular use.
Q - What tips can you give us that will help keep our kitchens neat and tidy and easy to manage?
A - Whether you have the space or have to depend on storage boxes, keep your ingredients and spices together by cuisine so accessing them is quick and easy. Decanting standard ingredients like flour, pasta, dried beans and rice into storage jars makes cooking so much easier than opening folded paper packages. You’ve heard this before, but wash up as you go! A stack of dirty dishes quickly puts you in the weeds. I got a catering company to build me a very deep steel sink for both my DC and London kitchens. Dirty pans stacked in it don’t get in the way and can’t be seen. I also have long-handled hospital faucets which I turn on and off with my elbows when my hands are sticky with pastry.
Q - How many cookbooks do you have and do you have any favourites? Have you written any cookbooks?
A - Being a Food Writer was like Christmas! My local mailman would regularly stagger to the door with sacks of cookbooks. I’ve now weeded the hundreds down to around 60, of which I probably refer to ten on a regular basis. But I suspect for any cook it’s a rare cookbook that contains more than one or two recipes you go back to again and again. I have an exception, though. It’s my mother’s cut-and-paste book of recipes she clipped from newspapers and magazines.
For a cookbook to read in bed, I love Home Cooking and More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, the novelist who wrote on food for Gourmet Magazine.
Q - Do you have a favourite recipe that you would like to share with us?
A - Narrowing down a favourite recipe to one is a challenge! But this cookie recipe covers so many bases - good to give as presents, good to go with ice cream, good to have with a cup of tea or coffee. I was brought up on it. I think my mother probably found it on the back of a bag of sugar or flour.
Q - Have you had any kitchen disasters that you can share with us?
A - One hot DC summer, I made gazpacho for a big alfresco lunch from the traditional Spanish recipe that includes bread, which turns the soup a pale pinky-beige. I poured it to chill into some empty glass bottles. I also made some Vietnamese iced coffee for the end of the meal and poured that into other glass bottles. When everyone was seated outside, I decanted the bottles into a large china bowl and carried it out to serve at the table. It was only when the guests began to sip the soup and choke, I realised I had blended the gazpacho with the sweet iced milky coffee.
Thank you for sharing your kitchen with us
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Thank you. Lynn H.
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Love this post! That kitchen!
Hey Julia, How are you doing? What have you been whipping up for eats in your lovely kitchen lately?